It took Rachna a moment to think of her traps. “Yes, that was me. What do you mean you are scattered about? Who are you?”
“I am G4.A, a mark-three semi-autonomous battle unit.”
Rachna sat on her haunches and listened. In the heat a small bead of sweat formed on her brow, rolled down her face, and dripped to the leaf-mold below.
“My construction by Heavy Industries Group began January twenty-six, twenty-two twenty-nine. I entered service August fifteen and first engaged enemy forces at nineteen-forty-seven hours on the same day.”
The names and numbers meant nothing to Rachna. Calendar dates were figured from the formation of the New Gupta Empire, three hundred and thirty years previously. Prior to that the history books spoke only of dark times.
“Geefourdotalpha,” the name was strange and her tongue toyed with the sounds, “tell me how long ago these things were.”
“Nine hundred and thirty years.”
Rachna put her tongue between her teeth, pursed her lips, and sucked. That was before the dark times. That was so far back it could be in the fabled Days of Gold. When legends say the ruins she scavenged in were full of life, covering the earth. A time when humanity reached even to the stars. Legends. But the ruins were real, and huge. For several days’ walk in each direction from her home there were ruins; all covered by the forest.
Legend also told what brought the Days of Gold to an end: Giant Machines which towered in the sky, raining destruction until flames outshone the sun and smoke covered the moon. Grampa used to tell stories of the Days of Gold. Sometimes he would tell tales of the Pralaya, when that world was dissolved and humanity shrank from encompassing the world to occupying a few scattered outposts. She would lie in bed with her brothers and sisters and dream of a world swarming with people in clothing of the brightest colors. She would dream of their endless leisure, of their full bellies and the huge houses they lived in. Then she would dream of the dark descending, of the joyous calls turned to cries of despair.
When she told her mother these dreams she was called overly imaginative. When she told her Grampa she was called a true-seer, and he told more tales of Pralaya, of the destruction of the Days of Gold.
-*-
At the start of its final battle started G4.A controlled the sector. Ordnance flowed from storage bay to firing rack and spun through the air. A threat warning flashed with information from the control platform high above. G4.A walked towards the target. It strode through rows of crude concrete structures. Abandoned possessions lay scattered in the rubble, water spurted from broken pipes. Bodies of those who refused to flee lay where they fell, crushed. Those remaining then scattered, seeking refuge in what they hoped were safer buildings. G4.A loosed a volley of high explosives into a nearby tower it perceived to be a threatening advantage point; more bodies and rubble. It came upon a clear avenue leading to the target area: a vast shopping mall.
G4.A approached, scanning for the threat. A biometric sweep indicated clusters of humans throughout the levels. A flurry of point missiles shrieked away from the shoulder mount, arcing in a tight parabola to plunge through the glass roof of the shopping center. They exploded above a cluster of life-signs, which vanished. G4.A then fired a batch of thermite grenades. They flew, a salvo of explosive fire which flared hot, and fed on the very structure of the building.
The threat warning remained. G4.A advanced.
It crashed into the building, the walls providing little resistance to its titanium-covered body. Inside there was the same evidence of hasty abandonment as in the rest of the city. A strengthened ramp and walkway wound from a service entrance up through the mall, allowing vehicles access to upper floors. The machine made its way up the structure, constantly sweep-scanning for the threat. Fire continued to spread through the building, consuming abandoned wares and the fabric of the structure.
An explosion ripped the walkway support away. G4.A scrabbled for a hold, but fell five stories, crashing onto rubble in the basement. A missile exploded immediately above G.4A, ripping into its strengthened armature. A second missile followed. This one crashed into the machine before exploding. It ignited ordnance still inside storage bays. G4.A was ripped apart. Legs were reduced to fragments, arms torn away. That the power core and processing matrix survived was a freak occurrence.
Investigating its memory banks in the years that followed G4.A tried to find any explanation of who it was fighting. It knew the battle was for control, but had no knowledge of who the ‘enemy’ was, or why they fought. It hoped this human may help it fill in the missing details.
“Why do you ask of time?” G4.A asked.
“What enemy did you fight?”
“That information is not stored.”
”Who were you fighting for?”
“Cobra Corp.”
“But you do not know who you were fighting against?”
“No knowledge of our enemies was inputted.”
“They were human, though—not machines like you?”
The machine fell silent. Rachna wondered what this meant. An alarm beeped. She glanced at her data-pad. All three balloons had arrived at the aviary safely.
“I have no data of the enemies I fought.”
Rachna looked at the bundle of units and wires. This was history, a definite link to the past. There were people who dedicated their entire lives to studying history. They were discovering what life was like before the empire, before the dark times, in the Days of Gold. But a discovery like this would be on a different scale. A talking machine with memories that could tell them what happened in those times would be a sensation. People would come from all over the empire—from beyond the empire.
She closed her eyes and imagined the influx. The road would become busy with traffic. New roads would be cut, new buildings constructed. She would no longer need to buy in bulk when she went to the city, there would be a store, maybe even a doctor.
Or, they would dig the machine up and take it away. It was a possibility. Still, they would have to create new roads for that task alone. Taking her birds to the city would be easier. It might even open up new direct markets for her.
The skin on Rachna’s neck tightened, her breath shortened. She screwed her eyes shut, trying to remove the vision of a future where her solitude was destroyed. Looking at the tangle of wires she took a deep breath, raised the shovel high above her head and used the extra power in her artificial forearm to drive down. Two, three, four swift strikes, and the vocal unit was disconnected from the tangle.
“Geefourdotalpha?” she called.
Silence.
She called louder.
“Geefourdotalpha?”
Still silence. She nodded to herself, satisfied that there would be no influx to destroy the harmony of her existence. No new roads cutting blindly through valuable nesting sites, no buildings encouraging vermin to flourish.
She dug about and filled her backpack with machine parts, they should bring in a nice price. Touching a nodule on the spade, it folded back down. She clipped it to her pack and headed home, ears attentive to the birdsong.
-*-
G4.A did not feel pain. When buildings fell on it, when rats gnawed it, when lightning struck it, there was no sensation, only an understanding that loss occurred. It reassigned processing power to alternative functions, continued to monitor its environment, and listened for opportunity to make contact.
G4.A did not feel pain. But now it knew despair and the need to scream. A need it could not fulfill.
